John Everett Millais: A Biography by G.H. Fleming Constable, 318pp, £20 in UK
A darling of the gods (and of Society) in his lifetime, Millais has had a much harder time posthumously. When the swing came early in this century against Eminent Victorians in general, and Victorian art in particular, he faced a massed firing squad of critics and Modernist propagandists. Paintings such as Bubbles (which was used commercially as an ad for Pears Soap) were held against him, and quite rightly, while the sheer magic and visual poetry of his best works were correspondingly ignored. Pre-Raphaelitism, in any case, cut no ice at all with the purist, Roger Fry-influenced type of critic or collector, trained to look for something mysterious and indefinable called Essential Form.
Unfortunately, the Victorian Revival has been equally unselective - one of its biggest blunders was its recent attempt to resuscitate the reputation of Lord Leighton, a major exhibition of whose works failed badly in London. With Millais himself, care and selectivity are needed too, and not because - in spite of the simplistic verdict on him - he abandoned his early genius to produce potboilers and became a kind of superior tradesman of art. He painted good and bad pictures at all stages of his career, which is what makes his case so puzzling, and he seems to have liked them all equally and not to have distinguished between his best and his worst. This dichotomy was mirrored in his personality - he was capable of appreciating the subtleties of Henry James, yet could also read the novels of Marie Corelli with enjoyment.
Born in Southampton, but raised mainly in the Channel Islands, Millais was a child prodigy who won all the prizes and in his teens could already paint and draw like a mature Academician. From the start he had what Rossetti only acquired in middle age and Holman Hunt not at all - the quality called "touch", the ability to handle paint as a born writer handles words. He seemed sure of a quick rise to fame and official success, yet his career soon became overshadowed by controversy and some quite hysterical attacks in the press. This was largely because of his membership of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the PRB, which from the start seems to have been seen and felt as a foreign body in the roast-beef-and-broadcloth society of mid-Victorian England. Pre-Raphaelitism was only a phase, with him and with most of the others - Hunt was the only exception - and most of the original Brotherhood either evolved along quite different lines, or stopped painting altogether. The Millais who painted Mariana, Sir Isumbras at the Ford, and Ophelia was an original genius who translated Keatsian Romanticism into the language of paint, but the public could not see that. It much preferred works such as The Huguenot or The Black Bruns wicker (the woman in the latter picture, incidentally, was modelled by Dickens's daughter Kate). Self-contained, even enigmatic visual images made the ordinary picture-viewer uneasy; he preferred things that were prosy and anecdotal, with the sentiment laid on with a palette-knife.
Millais's marriage has often been blamed for his alleged artistic decline, though this is too easy an answer to a complex question. Effie (Euphemia) Gray had been the wife of the much older John Ruskin for several years without, apparently, consummating her marriage physically. For a time Ruskin became Millais's patron and friend and invited him and his brother to share a holiday in the Scottish Highlands with himself and his wife. What happened there was predictable enough. While Ruskin read or studied, Effie and Millais found each other to be natural soulmates. She was beautiful, stylish and accomplished; he was handsome, gifted, an excellent companion for a young woman, and both of them were highly ambitious. Almost inevitably, they fell in love. Mr Fleming departs from the usual accounts by claiming that Ruskin had wittingly set up the whole situation, apparently to rid himself of his wife, and he makes a plausible case for this. Effie sued for an annulment, alleging that Ruskin was sexually impotent - an allegation he denied, though he did not defend the case. After a suitable interval, Effie and Millais were married and after living with a husband who never shared her bed, Effie now found that his replacement was exactly the opposite: he could never have enough of her physically. After a series of pregnancies, she appears to have called a halt and from then on spent a good deal of her time away from home. Intensely ambitious socially, and with a luxury streak, she spent money prodigally so that Millais, though an uxorious husband, had to call her to order - not, it seems, with much effect.
Millais became a big earner by Victorian standards, when after the painstaking technique of his early pictures he evolved a broad, bravura manner based partly on Velasquez. The public loved coy depictions of little girls such as Cherry Ripe and My First Sermon (though he himself in private life was not particularly fond of children) and he also developed into a successful portraitist who painted most eminent contemporaries from Gladstone to Carlyle. His portraits are a mixed lot, though the best of them are masterpieces - a fact that is insufficiently realised today. He also grew into the habit of spending part of every year in Scotland, where he painted a series of landscapes which are among the finest things in late 19th-century British art. They were done largely for his own pleasure, and critics and art historians have tended either to ignore or underrate them.
When Leighton died, Millais succeeded him as president of the Royal Academy, though he always found public appearances and public speaking difficult. (This book does not mention the famous letter from his old friend Holman Hunt, congratulating him on "going one letter higher - from PRB to PRA".) He did not enjoy the honour for long, however. Within a few months he fell ill with cancer of the throat, a disease which his doctors attributed "to his inordinate use of tobacco". Millais died peacefully at his London home in August 1896, aged 67, and Hunt was one of the pallbearers at his funeral, which was a suitably elaborate and public one. Gladstone had made him a baronet some time before, and when Queen Victoria sent a deathbed message asking if she could do him any service, he begged her to receive his wife, who had been treated officially as a divorced woman and banned from court ceremonies. It was duly done, at Windsor. Effie, however, died only a year after her husband.
This apparently is the first Millais biography in many years, and it is a good one without being outstanding. Somehow, the riddle of the man himself remains unsolved; he seems almost to have been two people under one skin, a nervous aesthete and a cricket-playing hearty, capable of moving from exquisite sensitivity in one work to populist vulgarity in the next. He could be wounded emotionally by any hostile criticism, yet his self-belief was remarkable - he once told his wife, after emerging from an exhibition of his pictures: "I am most completely convinced of the superiority of my pictures to all living work." Born with natural gifts which few English artists have ever equalled, he often misused his talents and was content to reflect the spirit of an era which brimmed with energy and aspiration, but lacked real taste and discrimination. No final verdict has yet been given on the Millais Case, and at the time of writing, the jury is still out.